1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for querying adaptors in a system to determine information on the adaptor connections
2. Description of the Related Art
A storage subsystem, or enterprise storage server, such as the International Business Machines Corporation's (“IBM) (IBM is a registered trademark of IBM) Enterprise Storage Server, includes multiple adaptor cards to enable communication with different devices. The storage subsystem typically manages access to a storage system for multiple attached hosts. Certain of the ports on the adaptor cards in the storage subsystem may be connected to another device over a network, where such connection may comprise a point-to-point connection, arbitrated loop, fabric (e.g., Storage Area Network (SAN)), a broadcast bus (e.g., Ethernet) and other network topologies known in the art. The devices attached to the adaptors may comprise storage devices or other systems. Other adaptor ports may connect to a switch that provides connections to multiple devices or further cascading switches. The adaptors may support protocols such as Fibre Channel and additional network protocols.
A storage controller may also include a management interface to allow administrators to determine information on the storage controller and its connections. A management interface may be used to invoke a process to query each of the adaptor cards in the storage subsystem to determine the devices to which the storage subsystem is connected. This query process may involve querying a device directly connected to the adaptor or querying a switch to determine all possible devices in the network to which that port may connect through the one or more switches and determine the state of the connection and devices on the connection. The devices terminating on the connections may comprise another storage subsystem, storage devices or a switch providing a connection to additional switches, storage devices, and storage subsystems. The queried information allows the network administrator to obtain information on the nodes in the network available through the storage subsystem. Host systems may access the storage subsystem to access storage volumes on storage devices accessible to the storage subsystem.
In current storage subsystems, a single task may be dispatched to serially query each adaptor in a synchronous manner to determine status information on the connections supported by the queried adaptor and devices terminating on such connections.